NOTES for Heb 1:1-14

For a correct understanding of the meaning of the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is important to remember by whom and when it was written. According to the view commonly accepted today among biblical scholars, the author of the epistle was not Paul himself, but one of his disciples, and it was written after the apostle's martyrdom. He was apparently executed in the second half of the 60s. Most likely, the Epistle to the Hebrews came into being after A.D. 70, which became a turning point in Jewish history, and in many ways in world history as well. In that very year, after the anti-Roman uprising raised by the Zealots, Judea was crushed, and Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed to the ground in the literal sense of the word.

In scale this catastrophe was comparable to the catastrophe of 587 B.C., when the city and the Temple were destroyed by the Babylonian army and the period of the seventy-year Babylonian captivity began for the Jewish people. Such events inevitably produce a crisis: social and political, as well as religious. And the crisis experienced in the 70s by the Jewish people and the Synagogue could not help affecting the Church, which at that time was still predominantly Judeo-Christian both in composition and, more importantly, in worldview: Judeo-Christian views and traditions shaped the mentality of both the earliest Christian Church and, in part, the early Christian Church.

Meanwhile, one of the signs of the religious crisis was mystical messianism, which was rapidly replacing political messianism both in circles around the synagogue and in circles around the church. Later this messianism gave rise to numerous gnostic schools and movements. And if political messianism saw the Messiah as an ordinary man, an earthly ruler acting according to God's will, mystical messianism was more ready to see in him some superhuman being, more like an angel than a man. But the author of the epistle, whose name is unknown to us, never tires of reminding his readers that the Messiah is greater than any angel (vv. 1-4), that the way into the Kingdom was not opened to humanity by angels at all (vv. 5-12), and that angels are merely created spirits performing strictly service functions for God (vv. 13-14). He reminds his readers that the meaning of Christianity is not mysticism, but entering the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world and becoming rooted in it, finding there what no mysticism and no angels can give a human being.